10/22/2025
Somewhere Along the Way, We Mistook Preservation for Welfare
I’ve decided to pivot. I was heading in one direction with doing a series, planning to stay balanced, measured, and focused on the science, but after weeks of working on these posts, I kept landing in the same place.
Every time I tried to make it neutral or balanced, to show both sides, I kept circling back to the same uncomfortable truth I didn’t want to water down.
After writing, rewriting, and collecting studies for weeks, I realized something:
The research has already been clear for years.
It’s not about proving the risks anymore.
It’s about asking why we keep justifying them.
I’m not speaking about short-term, once-in-a-while stalling, not rehab, weather holds, brief hours of rest, or decisions made with their health in mind.
I’m talking about confinement in the name of preservation.
Stall time that exceeds turnout time, a lifetime spent inside instead of out.
The kind that removes a horse’s freedom under the guise of keeping them show-ready, preserved, pristine, but no longer living as a horse.
There are endless studies documenting the risks of confinement, physically and mentally.
I’ve read them, collected them, cited them.
But no amount of studying changed what the science kept showing me, confinement isn’t welfare.
A horse is meant to be a horse.
And being a horse means the ability to roll, graze, rest, move, and socialize.
According to the Five Domains of Animal Welfare, wellbeing is built on nutrition, environment, health, behaviour, and mental state, and the Three F’s, freedom, friends, and forage, form the foundation of every one of those pillars.
So ask yourself: when a horse spends more time in a stall, isolated and confined, than turned out, is that supported by either of those models?
Every measure of welfare science says no.
When we take those things away, when we isolate, confine, and micromanage them, especially in the name of performance, we’re not protecting them.
We’re exploiting them.
And if the end goal, the prize and reward for good performance, is to one day “retire outside,” then we’ve already admitted there’s something wrong with the “care” they receive today.
We can’t call it care if it only exists on our terms or for our benefit.
Because at the end of the day, if being “the best” means taking away everything that makes a horse a horse, then maybe it’s time to question if we truly love the animal.
